Besides, this passage by proving too much really proves nothing. Only three thousand men able to bear arms in all Greece! Who can admit so strange a proposition, especially if we consider the great number of Greek cities whose names still remain in history, and which are mentioned by writers long after the age of Plutarch? There are there surely ten times more people at present, when there scarce remains a city in all the bounds of ancient Greece. That country is still tolerably cultivated, and furnishes a sure supply of corn in case of any scarcity in Spain, Italy, or the South of France. We may observe that the ancient frugality of the Greeks, and their equality of property, still subsisted during the age of Plutarch, as appears from Lucian. Nor is there any ground to imagine that that country was possessed by a few masters and a great number of slaves. It is probable, indeed, that military discipline, being entirely useless, was extremely neglected in Greece after the establishment of the Roman Empire; and if these commonwealths, formerly so warlike and ambitious, maintained each of them a small city-guard to prevent mobbish disorders, it is all they had occasion for; and these, perhaps, did not amount to three thousand men throughout all Greece. I own that if Plutarch had this fact in his eye, he is here guilty of a very gross paralogism, and assigns causes nowise proportioned to the effects. But is it so great a prodigy that an author should fall into a mistake of this nature?​[101] But whatever force may remain in this passage of Plutarch, we shall endeavour to counterbalance it by as remarkable a passage in Diodorus Siculus, where the historian, after mentioning Ninus’s army of 1,700,000 foot and 200,000 horse, endeavours to support the credibility of this account by some posterior facts; and adds that we must not form a notion of the ancient populousness of mankind from the present emptiness and depopulation which is spread over the world. Thus an author, who lived at that very period of antiquity which is represented as most populous,​[102] complains of the desolation which then prevailed, gives the preference to former times, and has recourse to ancient fables as a foundation for his opinion. The humour of blaming the present and admiring the past is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the most profound judgment and most extensive learning. NOTES, OF THE POPULOUSNESS OF ANCIENT NATIONS.